Presidents tend to borrow from one another. It ensures that the country runs in the same way, regardless of who the president is. If one president acts too irrationally from a previous administration, it can confuse everyone – including Americans and world leaders.
If Joe Biden were going to borrow from anyone, it should be Trump. After all, Trump just spent the last four years in the White House.
Instead, Joe Biden decides that he’ll borrow from Bill Clinton.
There are just a few problems with all of this.
Borrowing has to make sense. Now, we all know that Biden does a lot of things that don’t make sense. But he has advisors that should be working to keep him from embarrassing our country and making messes that he doesn’t know how to clean up.
Had Biden borrowed from Trump for the immigration plan, we wouldn’t be in this mess at the southern border. Instead, Biden wanted to show that he was a grown-up and could make his own decisions. So, out went all the treaties with the Central American governments.
Fine. You don’t want to borrow from presidents, don’t borrow from any.
Oh, but Biden can’t actually prove that he’s a grown-up. He can’t make all of his own decisions.
When it comes to the rising violence against Asian Americans, he’s going to borrow against what Clinton did back in the 1990s.
He’s going to borrow a plan that was used 30 years ago. He clearly doesn’t understand that times have changed – and what worked three decades ago is unlikely to work now.
Yet, Biden has promised that he’s going to take steps to address Anti-Asian crimes.
We can’t be silent in the face of rising violence against Asian Americans. That’s why today I’m taking additional steps to respond–including establishing an initiative at the Department of Justice to address anti-Asian crimes.
These attacks are wrong, un-American, and must stop.
— President Biden (@POTUS) March 30, 2021
He relaunched the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI).
In a statement, Biden is looking to address the rise in Anti-Asian violence. He stated, “They’ve been attacked, blamed, scapegoated, and harassed. They’ve been verbally assaulted, physically assaulted, killed.”
Almost every minority group in the country can say that. Many feel as though they’re experiencing more violence within their groups than ever before. Gotta love that call for unity that Biden made.
When Biden speaks, however, he doesn’t talk about unity. He talks about acknowledging a prejudice that has always been found in the country. He believes that silence is complicity and that hate and violence hides in plain sight.
Much of the renewed violence on Asian violence, however, is due to COVID-19. Since it originated in China, Americans have come up with slanderous names for the coronavirus. It also leads many to express xenophobia toward Asian Americans.
There are plenty of ways to address bias and xenophobia, which include explaining the origins of COVID and explaining how Asian Americans are not to blame.
That’s not Biden’s approach, though. Instead, he’ll reinstate Clinton’s plans from 30 years ago. He’ll also provide $49.5 million in Health & Human Services funding for AAPI survivors of assault and violence. He’ll form a COVID-19 equity task force committee. He’ll launch a “virtual bookshelf” of federally-funded projects that explore how Asian Americans have contributed to the U.S. And, he’ll provide funding to critical research to address and prevent bias and xenophobia.
Somehow, Biden thinks that all of this is going to put a magical band-aid on the problem. He doesn’t realize that all of this is just talk. It doesn’t address the root problem – that there are individual groups in the U.S. that are issuing this hate. It’s not across the board. Just as racism isn’t across the board.
There are patterns of anti-Asian discrimination. Some of this has come from top universities, ye the Biden administration won’t address the issues that are right in front of them.
There has to be equality in the country. As soon as the Biden administration gives attention to the AAPI groups, the black groups yell. And when attention is given to the black groups, the AAPI groups yell.
The U.S. is a blended group of Americans. Some Americans are black, Asian, Latinx, Western European…but we are all Americans. We have to stop discriminating as a whole and treat everyone as Americans. Perhaps when Biden learns to stop dividing everyone into groups, he can actually achieve that unity he’s been talking about.
In the meantime, if Biden’s going to borrow from any presidents, he should really think about borrowing from the more recent ones. Anything that Clinton had to offer is far from relevant at this point.
